Sunday, September 23, 2007

Back to Work-at-Home Norms

Okay, so I'm working at home today (well, not right this second, I'm blogging right now but I'm going to get back to working here in just a minute) and I think that this working at home is much more typical of the majority of people who are working at home.

Because it's Sunday.

I'm not working at home in lieu of going to the office. I'm not making my own hours because I'm a free-wheelin' fun-lovin' contractor and I can do what I want as long as I bill enough.

No. I'm working at home because I need to read through my draft fund raising letters in peace and think long and hard about whether we're taking the right approach, and I haven't managed to get to this during the standard workweek.

In the office, I find that I'm tempted to say, "What do I care, I've been here for three weeks, I'm sure that whatever they decided to do last year is fine for this year." But I don't think that's the right thing to do, for a number of reasons. For one, my new boss is coming off a significant illness, and I'm thinking that some prior decision making might have been deferred, given how those kinds of things go. Also, I know how to write and I'm sure that there are some improvements I can make. (Readers of this blog may demur, but really, I'm not a bad little wordsmith. Really.) But mostly I can't stand to think that I didn't really give it my best shot.

So I've fished the drafts out of web mail and I'm sorting through them on Sunday. I suspect that this kind of working at home is the most common: most people have a bit more to do than they can accomplish during the 9-5 bits, and so we work extra "from home".

I am wearing slippers. I am not a full-time teleworker any more. And that's okay by me.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I work from home, I know exactly what you mean :) I work 7 days a week, when I'm not working to make money I'm working on finding more ways to make money LOL!

Stella Commute said...

Thanks for writing Asten. When you're working for yourself, it's really a never-ending cycle of doing the work, or drumming up more work to do. I've always had a "real" job, even when I worked at home full time (e.g. I was a salary-man) but it can be hard to find a stopping point with that, too. Maybe this is actually a personality flaw, because I find myself working a lot all the time for the new "real" job, as well.